A moving production of Steven Dietz’s award-winning drama that explores male friendship in the gay community during the tragic AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.

On arrival at the Tabard Theatre in Turnham Green, I am struck instantly by the exceptional stage: set designer Nik Corrall truly does a commendable job. It has the tastefully cluttered appearance you might imagine the study of an eccentric explorer in the 1940s to possess, bursting at the seams with books, papers, artefacts, and above all, maps- from floor to ceiling, of myriad types, shapes and sizes.

This, we will come to learn, is “Jody’s Maps”, a map shop owned by a man of the same name in an unnamed American city. Though I’m sure they do still exist (somewhere), in 2017 the idea of a map shop is something of an anachronism- quaint, charming, probably full of collectors’ items and hardly of much use. Yet Lonely Planet is set a mere thirty-odd years ago, and while I’m sure in part Dietz selected the setting for its romantic or literary quality, to a contemporary audience it now also serves as a stark reminder of the drastic ways in which the world has changed in that timeframe. A similar thing can be said for the play’s subject matter: while many feel that AIDS sadly is still not yet completely de-stigmatised, Lonely Planet serves as a horrendous reminder of both the lack of medical understanding of the disease in the 1980s and, perhaps more poignantly, the shameful lack of empathy sufferers were met with not too long ago.

The play, one and a half hours in length, is performed by only two actors. Alexander MacMorran depicts Jody, a quiet, thoughtful man who has of late been isolating himself in his map shop, while Aaron Vodovoz plays Carl, Jody’s energetic and wildly imaginative companion who persistently visits the map shop in a bid to rouse his friend from his worryingly introverted state. Yet their friendship is somewhat atypical: Carl lies continuously about his job, fabricating a new far-fetched career every day, and perplexingly insists on bringing chairs to Jody’s shop that he can’t accommodate.

It transpires that both men are in a state of grief: their community has suffered inexpressibly in the AIDS crisis. Their friends have died from the horrific and poorly understood virus and more and more people are continuing to fall victim to it. Fraught with emotion, both actors deliver sensitive performances that are able to do justice to Dietz’s subtle and well-crafted script.

At its core, this is a play about compassion and friendship that is produced artistically and performed passionately.

Lonely Planet is playing at the Tabard Theatre until the July 15.

Photo: Richard Hubert Smith